I have 2 years of experience implementing ITIL's best practices in those years I implemeted it in 2 diferent companies. That experience gave me the opportunity to get a new job and obviously my first challenge is to define ITIL's best practices for the on going operation.

I tried to follow my recipe (that gave me excellent results before) but it seems that IT management is relluctant on adopting these best practices, most of all because they don't know another way to work.

Does any of you have experience dealing with this kind of problems? I'll appreciate your comment.

Try to emphasize that the implementation of ITIL Best Practice will help with the quality of service an organization as well help improve the morale of the IT staff when the users of the service understand what IT is suppose to deliver ... and does._________________John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Thank you all for the replies, I think that my first step is going to develope an special plan, with an specific recipe for my current organization. Comments, obviously are welcome.

1. Deep analysis of the current IT department. How they work on a day to day basis.
2. Metrics, metrics, metrics.
3. Try to implement "disguised" ITL best practices using the current roles and once the organization is familiriazed with the concept, the ITIL evangelization will come.
4. Include sceptics (tons btw): "keep your friend close but your enemies closer".
5. Right now I feel like Tony Newman or Doug Phillips (depends on my mood) the whole department is focused in firefighting activities, words like: planning, strategic service, proactivity, capacity planning are almost banned.
6. Define an ASL.
7. Among with my current activities I'm going to work in parallel with my ideal ITIL basis so when I feel that the right timing has come I'm going to show the whole enchilada.

Reading the ITIL Book "Planning to Implement Service Management" can help you prepare everything to get buy-in from the management. The most important thing for the management is the costs vs benefits analysis. You must be able to show them this.

You may also want to get some external supporting material that shows how other big name enterprises are moving to ITIL. For example, Lucent just went over. If you find a large list of references of companies that have leveraged it, successfully, especially those that are in you industry and direct competitors to your company, then you run a higher probability of getting them to see that it's not only low risk, but that it's acceptable to other big and established enterprises, and that competitors are using it to clean up their act to compete more effectively against you.

These types of things help higher level executives feel more comfortable, since most people tend to be risk averse.

Absolutely. If you bring Industry standard benchmarks to the table, you may be able to open some discussions. A few items on my list:

- The Help Desk Institute publishes an annual survey about support standard data. It's a gold mine.

- It sounds to me that you should probably not start with a "deep analysis" because if they are not sold, that just sounds like cost. Try a "light approach". Bring a few key metrics from the standards and evaluate how your organization performs against them. Be careful to bring data that they can believe.

- Gather some white papers from vendors touting the results of other companies. DHL has made a great case with HP.

- Sell Sell Sell. That is the motto. Put together a communication program to sell ITIL before starting.

- See if you can get budget for a 2-3 hour session with an external consultant from Forrester or Gartner. Gather a few executives and prepare the session to demonstrate Industry Direction, expected results, etc. Those 2 groups are usually considered "independent" and are easier to sell to top management.

- talk talk talk. Understand everyone's interests. Everybody wants something. Make deals. For instance, I made a deal with a support group that if I gave them a tool to record incidents in less than 1 minute, they would give me 100% recording rate.

- Sell as a Service Improvement. Make sure to let people know that they are already doing a good job. You can take them a little further because you have a few tricks...

- Take the label of "the ITIL guy" and wear it proudly. You're right, take your time, pick small things and demonstrate small improvements.

- You're right in metrics, but 2 little things: don't use too much or it's going to be perceived as an burden, and baseline before doing anything.

Thanks for your time and your help I appreciate it. I liked the part of the ITIL guy because I'm surrounded by developers so everybody is looking at me as a bug, It's like: "I have been doing my job this way for the last 15 years, I don't need anybody to tell me what to do."

I think the best approach is to focus on the essence of ITIL, keep in mind that ITIL is not a commodity, it's there to address issues within organizations. In other terms, an organization whose operations are running smooth and whose customers are satisfied doesn't need ITIL.

I suggest the following approach:
- Work on identifying weak points within the company that are leading to: staff unsitisfaction, customers unsatisfaction, additional cost, etc...
- Position ITIL to the management as a solution that will yield some instant result but that will help the organization achieve its objectives on the long run.

So you need to look at the points you identified and search for some quick wins, mangement will love those. Explain to them the low cost of these quick wins versus the problems that will be solved and the result (keep focus on the cost and the satisfaction factors).
Once they get the feel of the quick wins result, you will get their support and commitment for the rest of your implentation of ITIL.

So far so good, I'm grabbing the advices and comments from all posts, right now with the tools that are available I was able to measure the total amount of incidents and service requests.

Once I did this, I took a dive into the numbers and some other projects were developed mainly focused on RFC's and problem management, also based on this numbers, the logistic of the service requests have change.

The results: a decrease in the daily incidents and service requests by 40 %.

My next step implement a different service desk tool based on ITIL standards and develop the CMDB. Once I get results from the implementations I'll focus on procedures. It's like show me the results and then you'll be able to do whatever you want in order to implement the whole ITIL methodology.

This is only the beginning, upper management is completely buying ITIL!!